Keep kids busy during long car rides: 4 tips

For many, the Holiday Season means packing up the car and traveling great distances to visit friends and family. It’s all fine and good until you factor in the “are we there yet?” and “how much longer” of the kids.

Long car rides traditionally translates to bored and whiny children, which leads to aggravated adults. Don’t dread the distance. Keep the kiddie companions entertained for miles.

Electronic entertainment

If your car doesn’t already have an installed DVD player, you can find them for relatively inexpensive K-mart, Best Buy, Target or free at the library. Be armed with an arsenal of favorite movies and buy a couple that the kids haven’t seen a million times already.

Hand held video game devices or iPods filled with apps can keep them quiet for miles.

Books

The library is a great place to find books on tape or CD, usually with a huge selection for kids. Also, if the kids have a Kindle or other ereader, let them pick out a book or two. There’s also the old fashioned, never out-of-style bookstore to visit!

Creative activities

When you think it’s time to take a break from the screen, present Crayola Color Wonders products. They’re great for traveling, and you don’t have to worry about the kids coloring all over the car or each other.

Other great activity travel items are sticker books, activity books, Mad-libs, or invisible ink activity books from yesteryear. Check out Klutz activity kits, too. Some of them are perfect for long car rides.

Brain Games

Play the alphabet game: name animals, food, or anything that strikes the family’s fancy. The license plate game is always fun, too. Or the colored car game, perhaps without punching someone every time the chosen color car is called out.

Also, travel sized board games or magnetic board games are a great purchase and they can be reused, unlike some of the activity books.

Melissa Brodsky has been over-sharing her random thoughts over on Rock and Drool since 2005. She recently Co-Founded a full service social media agency called Smart Savvy Social, located in the Metro-Detroit area. When Melissa isn't cleaning up after her 5 kids, 1 husband, 6 cats, 2 dogs and various other household pests, she can be found obsessively twittering as @rockdrool.or status updating over on Facebook. Follow her on Pinterest and Google+.

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